Which of these do you anticipate to become more important in the future in global business: cloud computing; mass collaboration; virtual/cross-border teams; or independent contractors? Why? It used to be necessary to bring workers to where the work was. But with the advent of the World Wide Web, the Internet, and mobile phones and the global communication they make possible, it is now possible to send work to wherever workers are by putting together multinational project teams, by using the Internet to recruit employees on a global scale, or by using open-source software to accommodate global collaboration. These new styles of work and employment are arising particularly in response to the capabilities of computers and mobile phones and to the chronic needs for IT skills in growing numbers of industries.

For example, one firm from Bern, Switzerland, recruited from the web a group of doctorates in discrete mathematics and graph theory from as far away as Belarus, India, Israel, and Ireland for a semiconductor design project. Team members never left their home countries and the team leader never left his home office. And the task group beat its deadline.

In industry after industry, as customers expect quicker service and competition forces shrinking product life cycles, employers are being driven to apply a "Hollywood model" to their tasks. They assemble the best talent available at that moment from anywhere in the world (which is the way teams are put together to film a movie). When the project is complete, the team breaks up and the members move on to new projects. The end result is a new and highly efficient global labor market unlike any seen before.

Even for small businesses, their new talent pool is the world. A new generation of online services is providing small businesses with opportunities to find specialized expertise and affordable labor. Main Street businesses can shop a virtual international bazaar of freelancers to recruit computer programmers in Russia, graphic designers in Italy, or data analysts in India. A small business of one can look to the world like a very large company and have access to all kinds of services. Technical advances have made remote work and virtual teams more feasible. And, increasingly, freelancers are taking on assignments like customer service, data entry, writing, accounting, human resources, marketing, payroll—virtually any "knowledge process" that can be per¬ formed remotely, even setting up and managing business profiles on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.